Monthly Archives: February 2017

On Facebook, a lot of authors host Book Launch Parties to celebrate the release of their new books. These launch parties can be an all-day event of the author talking about their book, answering questions, and giving tons of tips, or it can be just whatever the author wants. What happens most of the time is that the author will invite other authors to come and take an hour of the event to promote their own work. This is called an Author Takeover Event, and the event can be anywhere from one to three days long.

Author Takeover Events are helpful because every author involved already has their own platform and loyal fans who jump at the opportunity to see one of their favorite authors participating in such an event. Also the fans may be curious as to meet new undiscovered authors in the same genre. So this works in favor for everyone.

So what do you, as an author, do in such an event? You usually have one hour to talk about yourself/your book. Sometimes two hours, but usually it’s just one. That may seem like a LONG time, but really it’s not. Let me break it down for you.

An hour is 60 minutes.

12 x 5 = 60, so you can post every five minutes which results in a total of twelve posts. Five minutes feels like a long time, but it’s just enough for people to Like/Comment on the posts without being TOO long a wait. I will break that down.

So you have ten posts. You want the following:

Intro as you an author (who you are as a human being, something for the audience to relate to you)

Intro to your book(s) (what your book is about)

Post 1

Post 2

Post 3

Post 4

Post 5

Post 6

Post 7

Post 8

Post 9

Conclusion (usually includes links to your books/blog/website/social media and thanking the MAIN host for inviting you to participate)

As you noticed Posts 1-9 have no description. These are the posts you need to get creative about. So really, instead of TWELVE posts that you need to worry about making up, you need to just worry about NINE. The two intros and the conclusion tend stay pretty consistent although you can change them up however often you want. Just depends on how often you participate in these events. However, it’s the seven posts in the middle that you need to focus on.

So, what are some things you can post for those seven posts? Whatever you want. I have seen the following:

Paragraphs describing different characters from the stories (I recommend one character per post)

Pictures (of characters or locations or of the author or author’s pets, etc)

Facebook Live video

Giveaways

AND SO MUCH MORE

There really isn’t limit to what you can do. Be creative, professional, organized, and engaged with the audience, and you can do whatever you want. It’s an opportunity for you to talk about YOUR BOOK for one hour!! That doesn’t happen a lot, so seize the opportunity.

Now though, when you participate in an Author Takeover Event, things can get crazy pretty fast, so you may want to be organized beforehand before diving into it. You see, what happens is that you make a post and publish it, and you plan to wait a few minutes before publishing another post. However, after you post something new, someone may comment on your previous post. You turn your attention to it to reply, and someone else comments too. Next thing you know, you only posted one thing and fifteen minutes have passed, and people are wondering if you’re going to post anything else.

In order to stay on top of your posting and replying to any comments, I recommend you have all your posts written ahead of time, so all you have to do is copy/paste. Now, I use Scrivener, so I organize everything in one file. It looks like this:

As you can see, each document is labeled according to a specific time. This is because for that specific Author Takeover Event, my slot is from 4-5PM CST. Instead of me trying to mentally multiple by 5 during the event, I just titled each post with the time I want to publish them. This is one less thing I have to worry about later.

Here’s another organizational trick I do to keep up with my posts and everyone’s comments. As soon as I publish a new post, I go to the time stamp right beneath my name on the Facebook post, and I right-click then ’Open In New Tab’. This opens that specific post in a new tab. When I post another one, I do the same thing, opening a separate tab for it as well, and I keep doing it. This way, when I get a notification of comment, I can check the notifications to determine which post it is, and then go to the tab that contains that post rather than scrolling up and down trying to find the right post.

I have one main tab open, which is where I publish each new post. I don’t change anything with this tab. As soon as I publish a post, I open a new tab with that post then ignore that tab. I then go to my notes, copy the next post, and go to the main tab, paste the post there, and have it all primed and ready to go when it’s time to post. Once I’ve done that, I can skip around the different tabs I have opened and converse with everyone without missing a beat.

Now remember, all of these are merely recommendations. Everyone does everything differently. There is no right or wrong way to do it. If you’ve never done an Author Takeover Event, this is simply a guideline you may follow. Adapt and adjust it according to your own preferences. Pay attention to any rules the MAIN host of the event may have. Be professional but also approachable. And most of all have fun!